[tazzy531]

For a lot of these economic numbers and earnings report, they are provided to news organizations prior to the announcement with instructions that the information cannot be released prior to a certain time.

So, for this example, that time was 10:30AM. The moment it hits that time, the reports get pushed out into the newswires and reported on-air.

This allows the reporters to digest the numbers and figure out how to report it.

[analog]

So news organizations get this financially sensitive information before traders? Seems an almost too obvious way to make a quick buck.

[ig1]

Yes, but they have strong motivation not to abuse it. I've seen one case where an news org broke an embargo due to fat fingering a release, that news org lost early access privileges for a year as did every sister company that belonged to the same news group.

If you specialize in financial news losing numbers is a huge deal, you'll lose thousands of customers over it. And when those customers are often $1000/month subscribers it can easily mean a financial loss of tens of millions of dollars.

Within news organizations the information is typically restricted to 1-2 named individuals who have restrictions on trading. If they leak the information they can generally be criminally prosecuted.

[niggler]

R.R. Donnelly is still kicking even though they released google's earnings early: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/18/us-google-results-...

[ig1]

I'm talking about government figure releases (employment, inflation, etc and the like).

In that case it was probably just a contractual issue between Google and their printer, to the wider market it would have been the same as if Google had accidentally released their numbers early.

(Actually even in the governments case it's still a contractual issue, it's just that governments have huge power by withdrawing early access rights)

If RR traded on those numbers they would have violated criminal insider trading law.

[javert]

Outsider here, but I can't think of a good reason to give this info to news people before traders, and as the parent said, there are obvious bad reasons.

[tazzy531]

Much of the news ia a facade. Reporters often get things like economic numbers and speeches prior to the event.

Things like the State of the Union Address and candidate speeches are usually provided to the press beforehand so that they can package together a story. Next time you watch a major political speech, listen to the pundits prior to the speech. They will talk about all the things that the candidates are about to say.

With regards to economic numbers, there's very good reasons for them to do it this way (pre-released to media and embargoed). If it is not pre-released, reporters will need to take time to report the numbers which gives certain people an advantage.

For example, if you're monitoring Bloomberg for the CPI and the reporter is a slow typer, a person monitoring Reuters would have an advantage over you. Secondly, this forces a situation where reporters are in a hurry to get the numbers out which could potentially lead to errors. With these types of numbers, an error could have impact of billions of dollars in trades.